Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

After writing my first college level English paper I realize that I am not the writer that I thought I was. Also I have learned that writing can never be perfected. Changes can always be made to a piece and in most cases more can be said. Detail is an incredibly important aspect of writing and that is especially true in this class. Supporting a claim is important, but I have found through my first paper that appropriate and well timed detail is much more efficient that simply explaining something to its fullest extent. Although a person will never be able to fit all of the details about something into the 750 word requirement we were given, choice details can get the job done just as well. I do not feel that I provided enough elaboration in my first paper to fully support my claim. If I were to do another re-write I would do several things different. First off I think that my ideas and approach to the identity paper were adequately planned but poorly executed. I began by submitting a first draft that took the easy way out and was three and a half pages explaining how I had no idea who I was or what identity I had. My introduction was the only portion of the essay that received any praise when all was said and done. After the feedback from my peer and Steph I realized that there was in fact a lot of potential in my paper and I could justify a solid claim as to what my identity is from my introduction paragraph. This is exactly what I did.

My first rewrite was a hellish experience to say the very least. I knew that there was something in that paragraph that I could work with, I just didn’t know what it was. Then it came to me! For the last ten years of my life I have been the man of the house because my mother and father were divorced. This quickly turned into the basis for my identity and I felt it was a very rich topic to work with. The only thing was it would require a lot of detail to get my point across and this is where I tripped up in my rewrite. Valid points were introduced and valid evidence quickly followed. Just as quickly however, the evidence faded out and another point was introduced. I introduced point after point and supported each one with minimal detail. Unbeknownst to me my paper was quickly turning into a summary of my childhood and this is not a good thing for this type of paper. Although I thought I had come to a writing revelation, I was simply fooling myself into a sub-par effort at best. The lack of supporting detail made my paper seem forged and I did not like it at all. I was disappointed at the feedback and the result from my original draft and waited anxiously to receive my grade for the rewrite. When my grade came I improved but not by much. I actually went from a “C” to a “B-” due to the fact that I actually made an argument as to who I was. The funniest part though was that I received more feedback for the rewrite than I did for the original draft of the paper. In the end the point is that I learned something new that I hadn’t accounted for earlier. I am choosing not to rewrite my paper again so that I can look back at it at the end of the semester along with my future papers and see how far I have come as a writer.